I thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
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OH NO A SNAKE TORNADO: Twitter takes 5/2/20
We Hunted The MammothBucking the Backlash
We Hunted The MammothI thought I’d start up again with my little Twitter roundups. Consider these to be open threads.
–DF
@Simon : the even more ironic part is that apparently gut flora is linked to mental well being, and more speculatively personality and preventing some mental disorders. So they could foster actually dangerous disorder like depression and whatnot doing that, in addition of all the poisoning, child abuse, and everything.
@Ohlmann
I highly doubt that the parents doing this care about their children’s mental health if they are giving them bleach enemas.
They’re also extremely difficult to argue with. If you try to point out that what they’re doing is harmful, they’ll say something like “you can’t judge us, you don’t know what it’s like to suffer the effects of a family member with autism.” And when I point out I am autistic they either become extremely condescending or say that I can’t really be autistic because I can pass for neurotypical, or that I don’t know about “severe autism” (which is not a medical diagnosis or an actual dichotomy).
@Ohlmann, Naglfar:
Regarding ‘can’t really be autistic’…
Never mind that one of the comments I’ve heard on this is ‘developmental delay is not developmental stasis’.
Never mind that I’ve known several autistic people with whom you wouldn’t notice unless they were under stress at the time; from what I understand, the two biggest issues for people with autism growing up boil down to:
– information overload
– much of the social processing for ‘what might that other person be thinking’ doesn’t happen subconsciously
How to deal with these can be taught, it just requires somebody who knows what they’re talking about doing the teaching, and a constant extra bit of mental effort from the person in question. So people with autism are likely going to go through life with somewhat fewer ‘spoons’ than other people as a result, because they have to actively think about social interactions other people take for granted.
(Feel free to tell me I’m out to lunch, or if I’m using the wrong terminology; this is hardly my field of expertise.)
The problem then becomes that these parents not only aren’t giving their children the tools they need to actually cope with the outside world, they’re torturing their kids, and the ‘information overload’ part of it makes that even worse. Sure, the torture will make them ‘behave’ a lot of the time… that’s the point of torture, anyway, to make someone too scared to ever do again what prompted the torture in the first place.
Their own actions are making their children less able to cope with the outside world, and therefore actively making it harder on themselves, feeding into the martyr complex all the more.
@Jenora Feuer
I can’t speak for others, but for me it takes conscious effort to do a lot of social cues that allistic people do without thinking about it. The biggest effect I’ve noticed from this has to do with eye contact: I can either hear what someone says and process it or I can make eye contact. I can generally fake eye contact now, but growing up teachers would constantly yell at me despite the fact that I was a straight-A student because they thought I wasn’t paying attention when I wasn’t making eye contact with them.
This is basically what ABA does. It tortures children into behaving, and now that the original generation of kids who suffered it are adults, we have a lot of autistic adults with PTSD from it.
@Naglfar:
That about matches what I understood from others, with regards to reading social cues.
I knew one person in University who couldn’t hold eye contact with anybody… though in his case it wasn’t autism, it was albinism which resulted in a significant blind spot in his eyes. In order to really see people, he pretty much had to look at them from an angle. I will admit I found it vaguely disconcerting at first, but got over that fairly quickly. (And, later on as I learned more about psychology and sociology, I started poking at why it was disconcerting to me in the first place. Actually examining previously unexamined assumptions can be good for you. The sorts of people we usually talk about on this site need to do it more.)
I will admit I didn’t know that about ABA. It’s not something that I’d ever had to know about.
Doing a quick bit of research, I can see both why ABA took off in the first place (it was a lot better than institutionalizing folks, which isn’t saying much) and why it’s a problem now (originally a one-size-fits-all approach for vastly different people, active punishment of anything not ‘normal’, and enough free reign that some therapists are going to be far worse than others). It also looks like a lot of what is called ABA these days is rather different from the original ABA, partly due to these concerns. Which was probably done because medical insurance would pay for ABA but not other approaches, but which also causes problems in that the family has less idea of what they will actually get if it’s all called the same thing.
I also find it absolutely not surprising that the person who developed it in the first place was of the Skinnerian school of psychology.
@Jenora Feuer
I haven’t experienced ABA fortunately, but from what I’ve heard the problem stems from it’s repression of stimming, which is generally harmless and repressing it can cause a lot of stress. As well, often times it has involved corporal punishments. IIRC it is also promoted by Autism Speaks.
@ Naglfar & re: eye contact
I knew a guy who had strabismus and usually didn’t look people in the eye, because he said no one could ever really tell he was looking them in the eye anyway, since his eyes were looking in different directions. I don’t remember how it came up in conversation, but I don’t remember it feeling weird even before that. Thinking back, I’m sure he’d learned to give other cues to tell you he was listening.
So it seems especially cruel that someone would yell at a child about something that can have so many different reasons and doesn’t really matter that much.
@Masse_Mysteria:
I had a friend who had been like that; he got it corrected by surgery when he was young, but he never did ‘properly’ develop stereoscopic vision. Needless to say, he absolutely hated having things thrown at him, as he could never judge how far away something was.
One of my high school physics teachers actually had an ‘evil eye’: one of her eyes was enlarged and stuck in the socket so it didn’t move. She was also one of the better physics teachers I ever had.
So much of bigotry just seems to be a combination of ‘sheltered upbringing’ and ‘disgust’. Getting exposed to a wide variety of different types of people early on can help break the first, at least… of course, that’s part of why so many bigoted parents hate the idea exposing their children to people who are different, because they might grow up to not be bigots.
@Jenora Feuer
That’s another thing. I have absolutely horrible catching and throwing ability (which I think is related to autism) so I hate it when people throw things at me and expect me to catch.
I see a lot of transphobes say that trans* people need to stay away from children because that might make the children trans* (and the same has been said about gay people and children becoming gay). I don’t think parents legitimately think that exposure to gay or trans* people can make their children become LGBTQIPA+, but I think the real fear is, like you said, that the children would learn that LGBTQIPA+ people are people and deserving of the same respect as cis straight people.
Not autistic, but I find eyes to be kind of creepy, so I sort of subconsciously edit them out. I don’t actually remember what color anyone’s eyes are.
People have, however, praised me in a few times in the past for being someone who will always look at them in the eyes. That’s not what I’m actually doing. I’m watching their face, because I’m good at reading micro-expressions and can get a feel whether their apparent mood/attitude is sincere. Their eyes just happen to be in the general area. Don’t know if that counts, because I’m not actually sure why anyone would want to look at someone in the eyes. I don’t particularly care where someone’s looking as long as I can get at least a halfway decent read on their face.
I personally tend to avoid looking at the eye, especially of pretty people, because generally it’s the most attractive part of a person and gazing at the attractive part is creepy.
@Nagflar : I do believe thoses bigots sincerely think it’s a way to avoid being [whatever characteristic they hate]. You give them too much self-consciousness by thinking they have a plan greater than that.
Also, for homosexuality and transsexuality, seeing models help get out of the closets, so functionaly for bigot exposition “create” more of what they hate.
@Ohlmann
I think it’s sometimes even just having to acknowledge that people who are not heterosexual and cisgender exist.
Back when we were having the whole marriage equality discussion here in Finland, an actual member of the parliament said (in the parliament, though I don’t remember if it was question time or a plenary session or what) that we can’t legalise gay marriage because if we do that, gay men can come into the men’s locker rooms and look at men.
To this day, I still can’t figure out where he though gay men had been changing their clothes and how marriage had anything to do with it. Maybe bachelors aren’t allowed in locker rooms?
@Masse_mysteria
A couple years ago in Massachusetts an anti-LGBT group managed to get a question onto the ballot about whether to overturn trans* rights in Massachusetts (it was very deceptively worded). It didn’t pass, thankfully, but one common trend in the advertising was that it would allow trans* women into bathrooms with young girls. Thing is, trans* women have been using women’s restrooms for decades (sort of like how gay men had been using men’s restrooms). This wouldn’t be something new. And we’re seeing similar arguments out of Britain with the GRA reform.
@Naglfar
When I was younger, I thought that people thinking like this were clueless, but nowadays I really think they’re just willfully ignoring the existence of anyone who doesn’t fit into their worldview. That’s the only explanation I can think of for people getting upset for Pride stuff or a rainbow flag or queer character in a TV show. No matter how many times these things happen, there’s just no accumulation. Every time LGBTQ+ things are brought up, they’re novel and need to be justified all over again.
It’s like:
1: Gay people exist.
2: No they don’t actually.
1: Well, that kid in your kid’s class has two moms, I’m pretty sure they’re gay.
2: You’ve misunderstood something. Even if gay people exist, they do it somewhere where I never get in contact with them.
After enough repeats and time, maybe:
1: We’ve been over this. Gay people exist. That kid in your kid’s class has two moms, they are gay.
2: Yeah, but that’s just them. They are the only ones. Other gay people don’t exist, and even if they do, they’re not like those two, those two are normal. They’re the only normal gay people in the world.
In my experience, the biggest bigots are not ignoring that gay people exist, they just want gay people to cease to be gay. They think gayness is a choice, and gay people could choose to be heterosexual if they wanted to. So gay people don’t really deserve “special” rights; they have the same rights as heterosexuals, to love and marry someone of the opposite sex, something they absolutely could choose to do if they just wanted to. That’s the position the bigots take, in my life at least.
Exposure to gay people doesn’t necessarily change this, either. There is a gay person in my near family, and my parents think it’s just a phase and that person will “grow out of it” sooner or later.
It’s exactly what you say, but I would also add that they are in contact with pretty few homosexuals and trans. Half because even now a lot of thoses hide it, half because in the end there isn’t *that* many non-straight cisgender people. So something like 70% of the people they know would be straight cisgender even before selection bias kick in.
No surprise they easily brush off thoses few they know.
@PoM
I’ve heard bigots say this, and I’ve also heard a similar position where they acknowledge that people don’t choose to be gay but still think that they could (and should) just be celibate and closeted for their whole lives. This seems to be the position of some fundamentalist Christians. For trans* people, they put up a similar argument that someone should just stay closeted and not transition in any way. They then claim to be tolerant because they say they don’t hate the people, they’re just opposed to the act of gay sex or transitioning (though obviously they do hate the people).
I was being silly, but I was mostly speaking of my experience with people who seem to think that LGBTQ+ people exist out there but that their own workplace or such shouldn’t need to take “those people” into account. “Those people” are something strange and unusual, something you see in a Pride parade, and if someone is one of “those people” but is not strange and unusual, they must be some sort of a fluke.
I’ve mostly encountered this second hand, but I’m still at a loss for words for that one time when I was told that a girl I went to school with can’t be a lesbian (even though she apparently is) since she always seemed so “mainstream”.
I’m not saying exposure to minorities will eventually fix bigotry, I meant that if you hate people you’ve never met and then for some reason meet them and have to interact them, realising they’re just people like everyone else will probably not make you realise you’ve been wrong but think that these people you’ve been in contact with are some sort of an exception.
@Naglfar
Back when I was hanging on an Internet forum for asexuals, I read someone had been told their asexuality is not a sin in the eyes of god unless they “act on it”. It’s all very confusing.
@Masse_mysteria
Wait, so that means it’s a sin if they don’t have sex? I’m not asexual, but if not having sex at any given moment is a sin, I’ve done a lot of sinning. And since I’m currently quarantined without a sexual partner, will continue to sin by not having sex until it is safe to go on dates again. It must be very hard to live a sin-free life, I think I’d get sore, never mind refractory periods.
@Masse_Mysteria:
I don’t know if whoever originally said it was thinking along these lines, but a legitimate take on that is: Pre-internet, it wasn’t unheard of for asexuals to be all “abstinence before marriage”, marry non-aces, and then refuse to have sex with them, under the idea that “love conquers all” (in this case, that if they really loved them, non-aces should be able to put aside getting their sexual needs fulfilled… and if they can’t, it’s not love). This of course almost never works, leading to divorce, cheating, rape, or worst of all (in the eyes of religious fundamentalists) not producing children.
@Snowberry
I don’t believe this is how you intended it, but it feels like your post is implying that ace people are somehow victimizing allo people by not having sex with them after being married. And that’s… Not great.
Obviously people should have a frank discussion about what their expectations are before getting married, and you can’t expect love to “fix” allo people and make them ace, any more than you can expect love to “fix” ace people and make them allo (though in my experience, the latter concept is incredibly more common than the former.) But hearing what sounds like “well, some ace people selfishly refused to fulfill their spouses needs!” here feels pretty shitty, not gonna lie.
@Catalpa: Ergh, no. Re-reading it, I can see how it can be easily interpreted that way. I didn’t mean to put it all on ace people, just that lack of communication on both sides about relationship expectations pre-marriage and then expecting the other person to conform to them post-marriage is a serious problem, and it is especially likely to go wrong if one person is ace and the other has a high sex drive. Of course the ace person is much more likely to be blamed in that case because they’re not the presumed default, which wasn’t entirely unfair… but on the other hand, the social (and in some cases, economic) pressure to get married wasn’t really fair to most ace people either, so… it’s a mess. Now that people are actually talking about that sort of thing, that kind of mess is much less likely to happen.
@snowberry,
…what Catalpa said. I’m pretty sure you didn’t mean to be hurtful, but that kinda felt like a kick in the teeth.
I think you meant to convey that what fundamentalists were thinking, and weren’t expressing your own thoughts.
Still, ow.
I’m already incredibly paranoid about accidentally leading people on after one of my good friends caught feelings and the “I’m sorry but I don’t want to date you” conversation put our friendship in an incredibly awkward and sucky place for YEARS.
So… yeah.
It sucks when people don’t figure out they have an intrinsic incompatibility of needs until after marriage.
It also sucks to be constantly reminded that I’m incredibly unlikely to ever be married, and if I do and my partner cheats on/rapes/divorces me it’s OBVIOUSLY because I’m ace and frigid and garbage.
Again, I don’t think that was your intent. I think you were saying what they thought ‘acting on ace-ness” was.
Ack! Ninja’d by a reply and my response is in the mod-buffer of “haha can’t edit this” purgatory.
@snowberry, ignore the long reply of mine. You already got the message and I did not mean to keep poking at you with a stick.
@Catalpa, contrapangloss, others
Just to be clear, my comment was in no way meant to be aphobic. I was trying to mock what the aphobes said by ridiculing the idea of sin and “acting on it”. If my comment was aphobic or otherwise hurtful to anyone here, I apologize.